Will Cipher Novels & Stories

You know what we are. Dante showed it to me without expression. "Who sent this?" I asked. "Unknown sender," he said. "But the cipher they used." He paused. "Only three people in the world have that cipher. Two of them are in this building." I looked at him. "Who is the third?" His jaw tightened. "Your mother," he said.

"But there is a complication." "Of course there is." "The Hollowsmith's message. Well done. He sent it through the Market's vendor system, which I have monitored since the Market opened. The message was encrypted with a cipher I have never seen before. I cracked it." "And?" "The cipher contained a secondary message. Hidden beneath the well done. Two additional words." Jack's compass flared. Hot. Urgent. The needle snapped to a new bearing, pointing not down, not up, not at any person in the building, but outward. Toward the edge of the atmosphere. Toward the sky. "What were the words?" Jack asked. Katherine's gold-flecked eyes were steel. "They're coming."

I asked, leaning my head back against the stone wall and keeping my voice low so nobody down the hall could overhear us. "I am working as fast as I can, Alexander," Mae called back from inside the room, her voice muffled slightly by the stacks of papers surrounding her, "this cipher uses a triple-layered substitution code, so it takes a minute to match the symbols up with the right letters." "Just hurry up because Kaelor and Zareth already left the palace to search the old district, and if we do not catch up to them with the right coordinates, they are going to walk right into a trap," I said, shifting my weight from one boot to the other while scanning the shadows near the staircase.

Citadel Lower Rings, Market Vault The passkey glimmered behind the trader’s glass, a sliver of tech small enough to fit in a palm, powerful enough to open half the Citadel’s veins. Abigail’s eyes locked on it like it was oxygen. “Now,” she whispered. Samuel muttered something about bad ideas but moved anyway. He slipped a hand beneath his jacket, pulling the trader’s attention with a clink of credits while Abigail slid the case’s latch. The siren wailed.

“The name of the person who ordered the hit on me. The name of the one responsible for putting me in this fucking chair and killing my daughter.” The silence in the room turned weaponized. A few brows rose. Marcello’s smirk faltered. Dante’s fingers finally stopped twitching. “I haven’t decrypted it yet,” I said slowly, letting the tension bleed from every syllable. “It’s encoded. Old-world cipher. But I’ve tasked my best men. We’ll break it within the next forty-eight hours.” I looked at each of them in turn. “But I didn’t come here to ask for help.” I reached into the briefcase in front of me and tossed a set of sealed envelopes onto the table — thick, ivory parchment with each of their na